In the final competition between the two bidding groups for the Canada Line project, Bombardier's group (RAVXpress) lost most likely because of an engineering shortcoming: it was not able to come up with a proposal that did not have the section on the boulevard south of 49th in a trench without a cost overrun.
That's one of the things that SNC-Lavalin found it could address so that it won the bid: Lavalin wanted to do cut-and-cover south of 49th, and also made a bet that it'd be cheaper than a trench. The other thing was that it also figured out an innovative way to get a section between 2nd Ave and Broadway to be cut-and-cover, despite a conflicting sewer. If this was to be definitely not doable as cut-and-cover, then the majority of the stretch south of 2nd would still need to be bored tunnel due to the elevation. This helped keep costs down.
Another reason that SNC Lavalin-Serco may have won was because it was
them who "offered a discount", in terms of up-front public sector funding. As part of their proposal, SNC-Lavalin agreed to assume significant risks that would otherwise be borne by the public sector; this included construction cost overruns, tunnelling risks, on-time delivery, and operating performance. This wasn't entirely out of generousity; it was also partly made possible by the use of more cut-and-cover tunnelling, which is less risky than bored tunnel. This "discount" is the '$700 million contribution' you may have heard about, which TransLink is repaying throughout the Canada Line's operating life-cycle. It's the reason why it appears to cost $100 million a year to operate the Canada Line on TransLink reports.
(To this I can provide several sources, including
Susan Heyes Inc. (Hazel & Co.) v. TransLink documents, and the
BAFO document on the TransLink doc library).
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